Kill the Folk Heroes

One of the first challenges most new EMs face is figuring out who their team really is.  Often times, the EM used to be an engineer on the team, so they carry over their identity as one of the engineers.  Even when a manager is new to their team, they often invest so much effort building trust and relationships, that it's natural for them to see their direct reports as their team.  As unnatural as it may seem as an EM, your engineers are not your first team.  Your peers are your first team.

The concept of the first team comes from Patrick Lencioni's book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The idea is simple. Everyone belongs to several teams, but they should not all be of equal weight. The first team, the team that is the highest priority, is always your peers. For EMs, their first team is the other EMs and their manager. As a new EM, that's usually a pretty foreign concept. I've had EMs tell me they think it's a bunch of BS.  Obviously their engineers are their first team. I think one big distinction between an EM and a director is that directors almost always see their peers as their first team.

And so we come to the folk hero. A folk hero is a member of the management team whose confusion about their first team causes issues. A folk hero uses their leadership position to make their team see them as the hero or savior, most often at the expense of the org and the team. In my career I've been bitten by folk heroes a couple of times, and I've even been a folk hero myself. Given the title of this post, you won't be surprised to learn that it didn't end well in any of those cases.  Story time.

When I was still new in my management career, I was at a company that merged with our most hated competitor.  I mean, we loathed them. We were right, and they were very, very wrong. In the course of that merger, my reporting chain became interleaved, with my boss being from the other company, their boss being from my company, etc., all the way up to the CEO. Because my boss came from the other company, they were wrong, and everything they wanted us to do was wrong. I decided it was my responsibility as a manager to lead a rebellion against the wrongness. I went so far as to try to move my entire team into another org. My boss recognized I was a problem and needed to be removed. The only reason I was able to keep my team was that their boss had my back. Honestly, knowing what I know now, if I had been their boss, I'd have let me go. I was trying to be a folk hero at the expense of the company. My crusade wasted my team's time and cost us a couple of great engineers who I inspired to quit. Bad Daniel.

Fast forward a bit. I was at another company, leading a fair sized organization. Half of my org, under one of the directors, was spinning their wheels and unwilling to engage on the mission. I eventually realized that the problem was that director trying to be a folk hero. They didn't agree with my direction, and so they were quietly pulling in another direction. After that director chose to leave the company, the full impact of their folk heroing surfaced. The common narrative was that this person was the only one standing between the engineering org and cultural oblivion. Folks openly asked how we were going to survive without that director here to protect the people. We had to scramble to prevent the impending attrition apocalypse.

Fast forward again.  I had an engineering team in my org that was core to what we were doing, and they were very unhappy. I met with their EM every week to talk about the challenges. They told me the team was feeling left out and unimportant. I told them how critical to our mission the team was, and they agreed. We discussed strategies to help the team feel more loved. At one point I did a listening session with the team, and the team begged to be included more directly in the main effort, which was puzzling, because the problem from my perspective was that the team was choosing to remain siloed instead of getting more involved. It eventually dawned on me what the problem was: the EM was a folk hero.  Instead of owning the mission, they painted the mission as the problem and themselves as being in the same boat as the engineers, at the mercy of leadership's unreasonable demands. That episode cost me a couple of good engineers and huge schedule delay in a must-deliver project.

The most challenging thing about folk heroes is that they're hard to diagnose.  When you talk to the folk heroes, everything sounds fine.  You're the enemy, so they're not going to let you see what they're really up to. When you talk to the team, they'll tell you that the folk hero is the best manager ever.  That's exactly what the folk hero wants them to think.  Having been through a couple of folk heroes, the sign I look for is a team that's unhappy without a good reason.  Sometimes it looks like the team is the problem, because they're unwilling to follow the top-down direction. And the folk hero manager is happy to let you think that, because they're playing both sides.  The more you come down on the team, the more the folk hero gets to paint themselves as the only one who's on the team's side.

When you see that pattern, take a long, hard look at the manager.  Talk to folks outside of the team to get their perspectives.  Often peers and other teams will notice something isn't right before you do, and can point you toward the source.  Honestly, I have never successfully gathered enough confidence to terminate a folk hero.  In the two above cases, once I caught onto the game, they both punched out.  Thinking back on my own folk heroing, after I was called out, I also left. So maybe the lesson is just that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The trick is applying it in sufficient quantity before the engineers start quitting.

Good luck out there. As we used to say in a previous company, my CS degree didn't prepare me for this.  Managing is hard, and there's no instruction manual.  The best we've got is each other.  If you've have your own folk hero stories, drop them in a comment so we can all learn from them!

How To 1:1

Let's talk about 1:1's. The first thing most new EMs know they need to do is start having 1:1's with their reports. Figuring out what a 1:1 is supposed to be tends to be less obvious. As an engineering leader, your 1:1's are one of the most effective tools in your tool belt. Done well, your 1:1's give you a direct line into understanding where the risks in your team are. They also give you a chance to influence and guide.

Let's start by talking about what a 1:1 is not. It is not a status meeting. It's not one-sided, where either you're pontificating or interrogating, or where your only role is to answer questions. It's not rigidly structured. It's not just another meeting that you need to get through to get to the gap in your schedule. It's not something you breeze into with no preparation (most of the time).  It's not a social meeting to spend entirely on non-work topics.  It's not a gossip exchange.

OK, so what is a 1:1, and what's it for? Think of a 1:1 the way you think about meeting up with a friend you haven't seen in a little while. When you meet up with them, it's a chance to catch up on what's new in their life, tell them about what's new with you, reinforce your connection, and reevaluate where the relationship is going (e.g. "We should do this more often!"). Same thing with a 1:1. It's probably only been a week since you last had a 1:1, but a lot can change in a week at most jobs.

To get the most out of your 1:1's, you should spend some time beforehand thinking about the people with whom you're meeting, and BE CURIOUS. What is it you want to know about them? If there's nothing specific, you should at least be interested in how things are going for them. My curiosity go-to's are how their project is going (not a status report; more qualitative), how things are going in the team, and how they feel like their career is progressing. The last one should be a regular once-a-quarter question. The second is maybe more frequent, but not weekly. The first one is good for every single conversation. In cases where there's something happening in their personal life that they've shared with you already, asking about it is a great way to be curious.

If you have even more time to prepare for the meeting, you should think about what you need to tell them that they wouldn't otherwise know, or what you need to reinforce. Doing the pre-work here is somewhat optional, because many managers are able to pull this stuff out without much thought. The risk of not preparing is not sharing something you meant to share, which can be easily corrected with a quick Slack message in most cases.  There's an art to sharing without oversharing, but the rule of thumb is to share as much as you can without giving them anything new to worry about or creating expectations that may not pan out.  I'm generally very open about what's on my plate and what risks I'm tracking.  I also take every opportunity to either repeat my vision for the team or tie the conversation back to that vision.

A 1:1 is primarily a meeting to support business goals (indirectly by supporting the people who will achieve those goals), but it's also a great opportunity to build your relationships and establish trust.  Make sure you take some time to talk about some things that aren't all business.  Start the meeting by asking how the other person is doing, and actively listen to the answer.  I've found that sharing my own personal details, especially anecdotes about where things didn't go so well, can be a very effective way to build the relationship and establish trust.  Vulnerability invites vulnerability.  Do try to cap the amount of time spent on chit chat to make sure you have time to bring it back around to the business.  It's probably OK for one out of every few 1:1's to be spent entirely on socializing, but if every 1:1 is just a social event, it'll work against you.

In my experience, once I've established trust with my reports, they're generally hungry for feedback. Not necessarily full performance review stuff, but they always want to know if they're doing the right things to meet my definition of success. 1:1's are a great opportunity to offer some minor feedback in the moment. When your report tells you that they're proud of the way they handled that incident, that's your opening to give positive feedback on what you think went well and perhaps a suggestion on what could make their results even better.  You should be guiding with positive feedback primarily and using constructive feedback sparingly where it will drive big impact.  (Remember to SBI!)  If you know ahead of time that you have constructive feedback you want to deliver, make sure you take the time to prepare.  Write it out.  Role play it.  If it's worth giving the feedback, it's worth investing in making sure it lands.

Once you get the hang of high quality 1:1's, you'll come to rely on them as an important source of signal and a core part of how you manage.  What's not obvious is that as one climbs the ladder, 1:1's don't become any less important.  In fact, when you start managing managers, your world of 1:1's expands, because you now have skip-level (and double-skip, etc.) 1:1's to do.  Making time to check in with everyone in your org periodically is hugely valuable.  Depending on how big your org is, you may have to cycle through it slowly, meeting with most folks only monthly, quarterly, or even annually, but make the time to do it!  And if you're a new leader coming into an existing org, one of your first priorities is to meet with every single person in your org.  Yes, all of them!  They know things that you need to know to be successful and that you won't find out any other way.  And they need to know who you are, beyond being a face they see once a quarter at an all-hands.

 I hope this quick guide to 1:1's is useful to you.  One of the worst parts about being an EM is that the job doesn't come with an instruction manual.  I wrote this post to try to fill some of that void.  Let me know if you find it helpful or have feedback! 

Let's Try This Again

 So, I started this blog many years ago.  Then I got busy and stopped contributing to it.  Almost a decade later, I'm just now coming back to it.  And guess what I discovered!  Through an incredible act of not noticing the details, I never actually published any of my posts.  They're all still drafts. *sigh*  Before I start posting new content, I'm going to go back through my old posts and start publishing the ones that are still relevant.  Hopefully actually posting content increases my readership stats a little.